For all the years I have used the internet, I learned a little trick about a month ago that made me happy.

I do a lot of image searching and use Google 99% of the time. When doing said searches whether from scratch or reverse image search, Pinterest would usually be the top choices. I am not a fan of said site but now I can search and have Pinterest NOT show up. It's this simple.

Type in your search term then type a space (not underscore but a space with the space key) and then "-pinterest" or what ever site you want to ignore. Done and done. I think you can go into your Google settings and make this permanent if you want but this is a quick and easy way.

(CNN) "Oh, we're not planning to vaccinate." These are the words a friend says to me in the midst of a conversation about their impending child.

I silently count to ten.

"How come?" I ask, trying to keep my voice light and airy. Trying to pretend that I don't feel as though my friend has verbally slapped me across the face with this breezy declaration.

Their answer doesn't really matter. I've heard dozens of reasons. Autism, the world is safer now, the government is using vaccines as a way to get nanobites into the populace, vaccines are just a moneymaking scam. Or, as the wife of White House communications chief Bill Shine tweeted (amid a measles outbreak) recently, childhood diseases like measles "keep you healthy & fight cancer."

No matter what any of these people say about vaccines, I personally know they're wrong.

In 1985 my mother was exposed to German Measles due to a failure in herd immunity. Herd immunity is created when the "herd" is vaccinated to the point where the disease, infection, or bacteria has nowhere to go, and no hosts to hide in. My mother remembers getting a rash all over her body on Valentine's Day and being sick for a week. She didn't know what it was. She didn't know she needed her MMR vaccine booster, as they weren't standard at the time (as they are now). The other thing that she didn't know? She was pregnant at the time. With me.

As a result, I was born with Congenital Rubella Syndrome. I had cataracts in both eyes, a heart defect and hearing loss, plus a handful of other weird symptoms that I would find out later are classically CRS related but didn't seem so at the time.

After dozens of surgeries, I have a clean bill of cardiac health, I see out of one eye (not terribly well, I'm legally blind), and I wear bilateral hearing aids.

But I'm healthy. And not every fetus exposed to CRS gets to say that. Exposure to rubella in the womb can have many side effects -- the worst of which is death. The MMR vaccine, which protects against German Measles (also known as rubella) also protects against measles, which is more severe than rubella, and mumps.

Over the last few years, every time it becomes "time to get your flu shot" season, and every time a new measles outbreak happens, I find myself in an awkward position. On the one, hand, I feel the need to show up in Facebook threads, to hop on Twitter and to talk about why it's so very important to vaccinate.

On the other hand, I'm a proud disabled woman, and I worry that the perception that I am fighting so hard to prevent the disability I have means that I hate myself, the body I have and the life I live.

It should be noted that this is very much not the case.

Threading the needle of not hating myself or my disability but finding the source of my disability utterly reprehensible has been a difficult one, but I've found it. I'm a strong believer in the need for the immune herd. I love the life that I have. But I don't believe that anyone should have to live a disabled life -- let alone lose a baby -- because of bad science and a wrongheaded disbelief in vaccination.

Especially not when one of the most prevalent excuses for not vaccinating itself comes from a deep-seated hatred of and lack of understanding about disabled people.

In 1998, Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues argued that there was a link between autism and, specifically, the MMR vaccine which prevents German Measles. His paper was later retracted, as was another popular paper which continued to support this argument.

But with frequency, people tell me that vaccines will cause a disability in their children. They tell me the vaccine that prevents my disability and the deaths of other people and their children is just too dangerous. Because it causes a different disability.

It's just not true. And that's one slice of what ableism looks like.

The vaccination debate isn't formed around being supportive of living people or protecting the herd. It hasn't been formed around real dangers.

It has been formed around the idea, held by many, that having a disabled child, an autistic child, is the worst thing that could ever happen to you.

Measles is the leading cause of vaccine-preventable deaths in the world, according to Dr. Paul Offit's book, "Vaccinated." What that means is that people are willfully putting others at risk of death because they think autism is a worse fate -- and therefore worth that risk that others might die.

Darla Shine vaccine fact check02:35

It's selfish. It's cruel.

And the danger is invisible.

When I think about my mother -- about what she went through to bring me up in this world -- I think about the fact that she had no idea that she'd been attacked by a disease that had harmed me. A disease that could have killed me in utero. A disease that gave me multiple disabilities.

And as many like to remind me, I'm one of the more abled people with my condition. Other consequences of rubella in utero are developmental disabilities, more severe heart conditions which can result in death, deafness and blindness, and of course, death.

It isn't just those fetuses that we have to protect. It's the people around us, too.

I'm pro-vaccination, but I know that not everyone can be vaccinated -- so the herd must protect those who cannot be from measles, a disease which one study shows may (in addition to in utero consequences) erase your immunity from previous childhood illnesses like chicken pox.

How vaccines stop diseases like measles01:26

Not only did I grow up with the specter of rubella in my heart and behind my right eye, but I also grew up with a father living with a terminal illness. I cannot imagine the consequences for him if he'd contracted measles.

I think about that every time there's an outbreak, too. I think about the fact that it's not just an ableist decision not to vaccinate -- it's a selfish one. It's a decision that doesn't consider the consequences for other people.

I wonder how many people right now are parenting children who have measles and don't even know it.

I wonder how many people out there as adults haven't gotten their MMR booster -- or don't even know they need one.

Last year Apple, the computer company and smartphone creator, demanded that Facebook remove an overly intrusive device from their app store. They did. Problem solved? Well, yes and no. Facebook met Apples demand and reintroduced it, but it was even more sneaky, hidden in it were prompts that were just as invasive as the previous one. It was basically spyware! Now it has been learned that Apple has told Facebook their apps are no longer welcome in their store or on their platform.

Quote---> "Apple has since completely removed Facebook’s iOS developer certificate after seeing how they collect data on their customers."

Having been online as long as I have, I have learned that if you don't want a lot of unwanted and/or unsolicited emails flooding your "low key" email address, there are certain things you don't do. You don't go certain places, and if do go there, you don't click certain links. If by chance one of your non-invasive emails did require you to click here or there, be sure not to fill in your personal information or join something that may result in your personal information being sold through a back channel, otherwise they will do just that --and the unwanted email parade will be on. They, the drum major of advertising, will sell your information. If they do, the next thing you know, you will have a zillion emails coming from every doggone direction bogging down your "low key" email address and singing "hey, tootie fruity!".

Well, after having my "low key" email address for over three years now, every since my AOL account got compromised, I think I just may have accidentally opened the flood gates. Today I checked my email and among the many listed items there was a newsletter from Quora. I didn't give them my information, I had declined them. So I checked it, and it was linked back to a site that uses Facebook as their portal. It was a site I had clicked on while on Facebook and they had asked me to join their mailing list and I, as I always do when dealing with Facebook links, I declined. Here began the problem, just by clicking the link in the first place had given them the right to know all of my Facebook friends and all of my Facebook information, including my "low key" email address, even though I had declined them that right by not feeling out the questionnaire, they still claimed it. Now, each different day since, when I do an email check, there awaits another email from them ....and others. That others part is what scares me, by next week I expect I might be getting a thousand unwanted emails a day. I hope I'm wrong.

More than 40 percent of insect species are dwindling globally and a third of species are endangered, concluded the peer-reviewed study, which analyzed 73 historical reports on insect population declines.

Chillingly, the total mass of insects is falling by 2.5 percent annually, the review’s authors said. If the decline continues at this rate, insects could be wiped off the face of the Earth within a century.

“It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none,” study co-author Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, an environmental biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, told The Guardian.

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” Sánchez-Bayo added.

But according to the new review, the proportion of insects in decline is currently twice as high as that of vertebrates and the insect extinction rate is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles.

Insects play a profoundly important role in Earth’s ecosystems. They are a food source for many animals, are critical pollinators and recycle nutrients back into the soil.

In a November New York Times report about a possible “insect apocalypse,” scientists were asked to imagine a world with no insects.

They found “words like chaos, collapse, Armageddon,” the Times wrote. ”[One entomologist] describes a flowerless world with silent forests, a world of dung and old leaves and rotting carcasses accumulating in cities and roadsides, a world of ‘collapse or decay and erosion and loss that would spread through ecosystems.’”

According to the new scientific review, habitat loss because of intensive agriculture is the top driver of insect population declines. The heavy use of pesticides, climate change and invasive species were also pinpointed as significant causes.

“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” the review’s co-authors wrote. “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”

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